This invention relates to a novel product feeding device for combination weighing machines. This device is especially useful to feed product, such as uncooked meat containing oil and/or water, having sticky characteristics so that it cannot be conveyed by vibrating conveyor troughs as used in conventional combination weighing machines.
As a device for distributively feeding product to be weighed to a plurality of weighing hoppers of a combination weighing machine, there has been proposed such a type having a plurality of vibrating conveyor troughs disposed radially or side by side for transferring product fed to one end thereof from a central dispersion feeder or a linear feeder to the respective weighing hoppers under the other end thereof. Typical examples of this type of feeding device are disclosed in opened British patent specification Nos. GB2074329A and GB2125756A. The former discloses the radial type and the latter discloses the linear side-by-side type. In these examples, a conveyor trough associated with each weighing hopper is selectively subjected to linear slanting vibration for a predetermined time for feeding an approximate predetermined amount of product to the weighing hopper. Although this type of vibratory feeding device is effective to feed dry product having a relatively low coefficient of friction to the conveyor trough, it is inefficient and sometimes ineffective to feed wet and sticky product, such as uncooked meat.